Go tell it to the bees (and other honey bee facts!)

Have you ever wanted to have 30,000 little furry pets? How about endless pollination for your vegetable garden? What about a natural sweetener that you can add to just about every food? (honey on pizza anybody?). Then honeybees are the perfect hobby (and pet) for you :) 

Julia Cross, HOPE Springs Director with a frame from their bee hives.

Here at Urban Roots, we have two honeybee hives that add to the biodiversity of our farm and that we harvest local honey from. We also help care for two hives at Northern Nevada HOPES Springs, a transitional living community just a mile away from our farm. Both sites are near the Truckee river, so it’s fun to think about our little bees pollinating along  E. 2^nd  and into downtown.  

I started keeping bees 4 years ago and finally feel like I know what I’m looking at when I open the hive and look at a frame. The first year was a complete flop, with all our sweet flying friends passing away due to Varroa mites, who are honeybees most common killer.  Since then, we’ve learning so much about the bees and continue to be surprised and humbled each year.  

A Child's Drawing of Bee Anatomy

Here are some of the things I’ve learned... 

• Go tell the bees! “Telling the Bees” is an old European tradition in which important life events like births, deaths, marriages and funerals are told to the bees. When something important happens in your life, it’s custom to go share it with the bees and they will help spread the news! 

• Bees do not like the smell of bananas. Bananas contain a compound called isoamyl acetate which smells like the bee’s alarm pheromone (YIKES!). Lesson learned ; skip the smoothie if you are beekeeping that day.  

• There are 3 types of honeybees in the beehive (see photo below) 

• There is 1 queen bee (far left) per hive and her role is to lay all the eggs to create new bees.  A queen ensures the overall health of the hive by laying 1500-2500 eggs daily to keep the hive going  

• Drone bees (middle) are male bees. They do not have a stinger and their role is to mate with other hive’s queens. They have larger eyes and bodies compared to worker bees 

• Worker bees (far left) are female bees. Their roles in the hive include bringing in nectar and pollen, making honey, guarding the hive, nursing young, cleaning out the hive, and if needed, making a new queen  

• Three different types of bees in the honey bee hive including the largest queen bee, the middle size drone bee and smallest worker bee  

• Varroa mites are honeybees worst pest. Varroa mites are a tiny tick-like in parasite that feeds on bee’s blood 🙁 and can diminish a hive. We fight varroa mites by treating them for mites monthly and letting the bees make their own queens instead of purchasing them in hopes that they become more mite resistant  

• For bees to make 1 pound of honey, they need to make 2 million visits to pollen and nectar filled flowers!  Our bees made 8 gallons of honey this year, with each gallon weighing roughly 12 pounds. That means that our bees visited 192,000,000 flowers this season alone! Bees work incredibly hard to make food for themselves and for us  

  

  Residents at HOPE Springs extract their honey by using a hand crank extractor.

  
  

• There are over 1,000 species of native bees in Nevada. Honeybees are native to Europe and were brought to the U.S. in the 1620s. You can support both native and honeybees by planting native plants, growing a variety of plants that flower at different times, and choosing to not use pesticides or chemical fertilizers to your yard.  

• Honeybees make their own queen. If a queen bee is slowing down laying eggs or the hive for some reason has lost a queen, worker bees can make a new queen by feeding a fresh egg something called “royal jelly”.  Royal jelly is a special combination of nectar, pollen and bee spit fed to all bees. When a hive wants to make a new queen, 1 lucky egg receives more royal jelly than others and it changes her into the next queen. Usually hives make more than 1 queen when they are queen-less, and the first one that hatches, goes around and kills all the others.  

• Bees can travel up to 5 miles to forage for pollen and nectar. Typically, they travel between 1-2 miles daily to bring food back to the hive, using the sun angle as their guide home.  

• Honeybees live through the winter. Their population decreases significantly this time of year because the queen is laying less eggs. To keep warm on cold days, the bees circle the queen inside the hive and keep the temperature around 95 F. They form a ball of bees around the queen and circle her like penguins in Antarctica. On days above 50 degrees they come out, use the restroom, get water and forage. We leave the bees 60+ pounds of honey to make it through the cold winter.  

• Honeybee’s wings beat over 11,000 times per minute, which makes her distinctive BUZZ. Bees also give you many warning signs before they sting you. You might see guard bees at the entrance with their butts in the air, buzzing loudly. They might also bump into you with their body before stinging, and the hive will become noticeably  louder as more bees buzz.  

  
  

If you have something new happening in your life, the good and the bad, take a moment to “tell the bees”, let them spread the word, and see what comes back. 🐝